


Koonj

by ryoken



Series: a celebration for witches [2]
Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: F/F, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 04:32:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15016727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryoken/pseuds/ryoken
Summary: AKT 2 - AB AETERNOanthy revisits old photographs.





	Koonj

**Author's Note:**

> i'm pretty sure there's like a utena post-series zine happening currently that i didn't sign up for. oh well. at least it reminded me i had this in my wip pile

Anthy never truly met her mother, but she knows her, implicitly. It’s hard not to.

 

She also knows that her brother knew her, long before Anthy was born. But she feels he never knew her like she does. He would’ve never lived her life like Anthy did.

 

There is one more thing she knows; Anthy looks nothing like their mother and everything like their father. Not that anyone would ever believe her. She’s seen the photographs. She’s gone through them a thousand times while she explores what’s left in the Himemiya family. Technically, all the women in her family look the same. Show a few pictures to any man and they’ll tell you it’s all the same woman. There is no difference. The surface of each painting and photograph gives away no details to lead them to assume otherwise.

 

In this way, Anthy’s face has existed for centuries, though not nearing the millenia she claims. And with hair pinned up just so, makeup shaping her face just right, and a pair of glasses to obscure her eyes, she agrees that she really does looks like exactly like her mother. And her mother’s mother.

 

And because of this, she knows, she must really look nothing like any of them.

 

It’s during the midsummer of her 26th year that Anthy goes through the photos with Utena by her side for the first time. It’s been ages, and dust collects around the boxes. Anthy’s hair is down, her face is plain, and her glasses have been left behind ages ago. She knows this time, when she looks at the pictures, they won’t be mirror.

 

“Wow,” Utena says, digging around the box in front of her, pulling out a lamp, “Your family really keeps everything, don’t they?”

 

“Not really,” Anthy replies, looking over the towering piles of boxes. She heads directly over to the only box she kept in easy reach, Picking it up and heaving it over to where Utena is sitting on the ground.

 

“Oh, wow…” Utena looks inside the box, brushing her hands over all the photo albums and loose portraits and framed paintings, “How old are all these?”

 

“I’ve been collecting these since the dawn of civilization,” Anthy says, without the faintest hint of joking in her voice. Utena smiles. None of the photos in this box are more than a couple centuries old.

 

They go through the box together, and Anthy fills Utena in with as much of her family history as she’s learned. There is her mother, only 40 years ago. Only in pictures with Anthy’s father is she grinning, with blank eyes, hands crossed in front of her. There’s great grand uncle, a spattering of cousins, a few of her aunts and uncles. Utena listens when Anthy speaks, comments on how old some of the pictures look, and gets flustered when Anthy tells her they’re actually fairly recent, just water damaged. It’s calming to talk about her family so benevolently. Utena accidentally puts her iced tea down on a photo they’ve laid out and leaves a wet ring around it, but Anthy doesn’t pay it much mind.

 

Utena asks about Anthy’s extended family and Anthy answers in retold anecdotes and the small details she remembers. Some of them are worse than others.

 

Sometimes Anthy brushes off speaking of older male relatives who were kind to her in youth but who’s true nature she was informed of much later, through aunts and cousins she reconnected with after leaving Ohtori. Sometimes she speaks unusually sympathetic of the old women in photos that she only ever recalled as stuffy and callous. Utena can’t always tell what’s going on in Anthy’s head. But she can infer, more easily, now.

 

“We should buy a camera,” Utena flips through photos, her tone sounding particularly offhand, “We shouldn’t leave your little collection with just these. We should add more.”

 

Anthy blinks at her for a few seconds. She almost hums as she considers it, but then stops herself, and goes to speak.

 

“What are we going to take pictures of?” Anthy asks her. Utena’s face brightens.

 

“I think we should start travelling,” Utena says. It doesn’t sound like something she just decided in the moment, rather, like she’d been hoping for a chance to bring it up, amongst the usual business and routine of their lives these days, “And take a bunch of pictures to remember it.”

 

“That’s…”  Anthy stops and looks at Utena’s face, “...doable, I think. How much do planes cost these days?”

 

“A lot of money,” Utena tells her, “I think he should go by boat. Or buses, across land.”

 

Anthy nods. Boats she knows, buses she hasn’t actually experienced, yet. Somehow.

 

“Do you know any places we can stay?” Anthy asks her, “While we’re on the road.”

 

“Yes – well – okay, not really, nothing really definitive. I thought we should look into it together.”

 

Anthy smiles at Utena, but in her head she swears. Looking into it together involves using a computer, and – Anthy isn’t quite there yet. She’s not a fairy tale witch anymore, but she’s not exactly knowledgeable about the world these days. Utena seems to understand how to work it a bit better than herself. But that’s not saying much.

 

She doesn’t know the world, not in the same way, not as she did once. Utena goes on about her vague travel plans, and Anthy sits and pretends to hear her. Surprising herself, Anthy finds she doesn’t mind the hassle this trip is going to be to put together, and on another level to finance. Somehow, it all manages to seem like an exciting venture. Somehow, it doesn’t seem like such an awful idea to exist in the world.

 

Anthy looks up, and finds that at some point, Utena had stopped speaking. Anthy blinks. Utena is waiting on her.

 

“I’ll suppose we’ll have to buy a new camera first, won’t we?” Anthy says to her.

**Author's Note:**

> uhhhhhh my twitter is @iscariotcurse. writing blog @12thtemple


End file.
